What infuriates me is that both of the California Senators are co-sponsoring this piece of garbage. One of them is Dianne Feinstein, who is up for re-election this year. I'm a solid Democratic voter, but there is no way someone who sponsors SOPA or PIPA will get my vote.

Even better than phone calls would be the emergence of a non-SOPA supporting Democrat running against Senator Feinstein. I'm sure the prospect of losing Northern California to a challenger would get her attention.

we need a 3rd party, or better yet change voting to preferential voting, so you can vote for who you want and not against who you don't.

that way you can say I like this guy, but in case he doesn't win, I'll settle for this one

Instant-runoff voting. It's already used by many state and local governments, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to implement nationally.

Instant-runoff is a terrible voting system and should never be used, see http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ . Approval voting is simpler and better. Condorcet is best except that it is somewhat complicated.

I had dug into the math behind this at some point and recall that Borda was argued (e.g. by Saari's "Basic Geometry of Voting") to be the "best" in the sense of invariance under impossible-to-satisfy group preference cycles (A > B > C >A), with Condorcet a close second.

If you have any references arguing for Condorcet over Borda, I would be very interested to read them.

Edit: For people unfamiliar with the jargon, Borda is ranked-list voting, with the winner being the candidate with the highest average rank. Condorcet is pairwise-comparison voting with the winner being the candidate that wins the highest fraction of pairwise comparisons.

In this jargon, "first past the post" systems select the person with the highest fraction of being ranked first; this is argued in the literature to be intimately tied to the two-party dominance in the US.

It's too late for a Democratic primary challenger to enter the race and even in the general election the Republicans only have some fringe candidates. She's basically running unopposed.

Hollywood must be paying handsomely

They are: http://www.defendtheinter.net/

(scroll down to see a list of Congress members ranked by media industry donations)

A request to postpone a vote is not necessarily an admission that they no longer believe it the bill to be a good idea. It could be a request to move the vote till after people have forgotten about it.

We're not done yet. Continue to speak loudly as a voter (http://www.sopatrack.com/) and consumer (http://gizmodo.com/5870241) and let's kill this bill once and for all.

This is really good news. It actually sort of reaffirms there's at least something theoretically correct about our government.

While we complain a lot about money in politics, and it is a problem, ultimately we do have control over them if we pay enough attention.

Why is there not a referendum process in national US politics? It seems the only way to prevent government officials from passing this kind of legislation is through public outcry on the internet (and mass media, if they listen). People should be allowed to reject this kind of thing through a real process. Special interest has a bigger voice than the people most of the time. Referendums work in Switzerland (usually, let's not talk about minarets).

Referendum processes are no panacea --- look at the mess they've created in California. Among other problems, there are referenda that limit tax increases, which have obvious appeal, and referenda mandating spending on various good causes, which also have obvious appeal. The problem is that at this point, so much state revenue is committed to mandates that in crunch times, everything else gets slashed to the bone, whether it makes sense to do that or not.

See http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/who-kille... for more, particularly the parts on propositions 13 (limiting tax increases) and 98 and 111 (mandating spending)...

Such referendums wouldn't necessarily work in the way you think they would. All the American stuff that probably seems crazy to a Swiss person (like stiff prison sentences for minor crimes) is actually desired by a large percentage of the population. It could be much worse than the minaret ban, especially on issues that can be colored by religious beliefs.

This is not a win and it's not backpedaling.

They don't want to vote on it and have it fail entirely.

They just want to rewrite it a little or slip it past later.

It's not if but when a version of this will pass that will be abused exactly like DMCA on youtube.

That's exactly what they are going to do. They know that the outcry won't duplicate itself over numerous iterations, and they'll slip it by when people turn away for a moment.

I'm sure they will just keep pushing back the vote until people on the Internet are tired of hearing about it, or have forgotten. I expect it to work.

It seems to be a general trend across countries to get more and more restrictive on internet access and downloads.

There seems to be a good opportunity to do some good work here - I'm thinking of things like having a network between personal home routers to effectively bypass the control of ISPs etc, or encrypted distributed file sharing networks.

Pain is good thing, it means there is an opportunity to solve it, and the various petitions against this bill are a good start.

"It appears that lawmakers are beginning to realize how much damage their anti-'piracy' bills could cause to the Internet and to Internet-related businesses,"

Actually, it appears lawmakers are beginning to realize supporting it will put them in jeopardy of being voted out of office.

don't celebrate prematurely

This is democracy in action. If the bills don't get passed now, we must remain vigilant to them being buried in later legislation.

Awesome, can we get the same done for NDAA?

NDAA is already law, iirc. You need a brand new bill to abolish it.

Or challenge it in court.

Or civil disobedience, which has a long history of success for prompting legislation and judicial review in the United States, not to mention elsewhere.

You need to watch both hands and don't let your guard down.

They will pass this bill with some very bad things in it once they think no one is watching, just wait.

What we really need is a constitutional amendment that forbids government interference with internet infrastructure. The internet needs to be protected by laws that recognize it as an essential public utility.

A free and open internet is essential to the safeguarding of freedom of communication and to the economic health of the world.

Basic internet access must be recognized as a human right.

Thankfully, here in Brazil things seems to be moving towards that:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111004/04402516196/brazil...

We should get together a small group of people who know what they are doing to think about what such an amendment should say.

I think this is a great idea. To work, it should be extremely simple.

Just to spitball a bit:

"The transmission of any data owned by one person to another shall not be infringed by the government of the United States."

Something like this is what we should have had in 1995. Instead, all the corporate players are now in the place -- it'll be a long, hard fight. Whoever puts something like this forward should be prepared to be ignored, at least until they can't ignore you any longer. Then they had better be prepared to be slimed. There will be all kinds of over-the-top attacks: child pornography, terrorists, etc. Supporters had better have a strong argument (and supporting sob stories) in place for when that day arrives.

Take some notes of Freedom of Press for the Freedom of Internet.

The counterarguments can be simpler than you think;

Senator, would you prefer ineffectively blocking child pornography that paedophiles can work around or allowing children the chance to innovate and communicate freely for their future?

Senator, would you prefer ineffectively blocking occasional terrorism that will piss off terrorists or allowing political discussions freely?

Senator, would you prefer blocking piracy or allowing anyone to share their content freely? DMCA cracks down on this; a catch-22 that the creator must sell it to claim damages against DMCA notice abusers unless the police charge them with perjury. Not to mention that the notice is scary not only to creator but to other people wishing to re-share. The DMCA does not discriminate against non-commercial sharing.

Here's a good history of anti-Internet measures by USA: http://www.rense.com/general85/net.htm

Here's Australia's version: http://libertus.net/moreinfo.html

Interesting. Thanks.

I liked this thread so much I wrote a blog entry on it. I think it's something we should start talking about a lot more seriously. The time is getting very late. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464227

I would like to see a more general freedom to tinker enshrined in the constitution. Freedom of communication is important, but I think primarily the freedom to modify hardware without causing harmful interference should not be abridged.

> "The transmission of any data owned by one person to another shall not be infringed by the government of the United States."

They're claiming that the sender doesn't own the data being sent.

Don't hinder the communication, just prosecute the offender. Jail time and fines is sufficient.